The Hunger Games novel opens with a girl having a nightmare about battling children. Rehearsals for The Hunger Games: On Stage started in the same way.
“At the beginning of rehearsals, a few of us were having scary dreams because of all the fight sequences we were doing,” explains Mia Carragher, the show’s Katniss, “I had random fight dreams I’d never had before. It was a bit of a shock.”
Suzanne Collins’s 2008 novel is set in a dystopian United States. Elites in the luxurious Capitol exploit the much larger populations of 12 districts. Each year, the Capitol selects by lottery 24 children from the districts to be “tributes” in a reality TV death match; 16-year-old Katniss volunteers to take the place of her little sister. The novels sold more than 100 million copies, and spawned countless imitations. A series of films starring Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson cemented the story’s place in pop culture. The Hunger Games: On Stage is the first official theatre adaptation, and Carragher is the first to portray Katniss.
The production has been a decade in the making. The concept of a Hunger Games show in a purpose-built theatre in London was first floated in 2014. It took until early 2025 for construction to start on the Troubadour Canary Wharf Theatre.
The venue required six cranes, eight months of building work, 42,000 pieces of aluminium and steel, and £26 million. It sits among futuristic skyscrapers that resemble the fictional Capitol.
The enormity of all this isn’t lost on the show’s 21-year-old star. She squeezes in this interview between a fitting for the metallic ballgown she’ll wear on press night, and the evening performance. Her hands keep wandering to her hair, which is crinkled from being bound in Katniss’s signature braid all weekend. “There’s a lot of pressure that comes with it,” she says in her lilting Liverpudlian accent. “For so many people, it’s such a personal and close story. I want to do it justice, and I want everyone to enjoy it.”
Her father is former Liverpool footballer Jamie Carragher, and her brother James now plays for Malta. Carragher didn’t grow up dreaming about becoming a footballer, or even an actor, but a dancer. Her mother took her to classes every night after school. She attended a few drama lessons at Rare Studios Liverpool, then got into the specialist Tring Park School for the sixth-form acting course. “That is when I started taking acting a bit more seriously, and it became my main focus.”
Carragher studied for nine months at the prestigious Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute in New York. She landed small roles in a short film called The Watering Hole, Channel 4 drama The Gathering, and Let’s Love, a comedy with Hunger Games star Josh Hutcherson. When the opportunity arose to portray Katniss, she jumped at it. Carragher has been a fan of the franchise since watching the films with her family at age 15.
“As a young girl watching them, it’s so lovely to see a lead female, and for her to do well in the films. That was just inspiring to watch. When the audition came about, I was just so excited, because who wouldn’t want to play Katniss?”
Carragher was one of the first actors to be cast back in March, and had to keep the news “super super super secret” until July. She could only celebrate landing the role with her family (and several glasses of champagne). Rehearsals began in Sadler’s Wells as the new theatre was still a building site. The first week consisted only of workshopping the combat scenes.
Carragher’s role is especially physical. She’s never off-stage for more than a minute, and spends most of the second act running around the arena. Katniss shoots arrows, battles mutant animals, and climbs a tree with flames nipping at her ankles. Carragher took a month of archery lessons to build familiarity with bows and arrows. The director Matthew Dunster told Variety he hoped athleticism would “be in her DNA”. (For obvious reasons.)
Carragher struggled the most with the complex battle sequence at the start of act two. The Hunger Games kick off, the children tear into one another, and Katniss flees into a forest. Most of the cast gets entangled in the carnage. Carragher says: “We were doing that sequence for days and days, and it’s been chopping and changing constantly, because it is so physical. Those were the rehearsal days when we were all, like, dead.
“I’m also talking a lot while running around and doing so much stuff. The first few times we did a runthrough, I was just exhausted. I was trying to remember, ‘Just calm down and breathe. You need everyone to still understand everything that you’re going to say.’”
Some theatregoers were surprised when in the midst of murdering one another, the children break into a dance routine. Carragher explains: “It feels like this moment of madness. There are fights breaking out left, right and centre. There’s blood splattering all over there, and then, boom! We all come together and perform this movement choreography in unison.
“It shows that all these tributes are kind of the same. We’re all just kids thrown into this crazy game. It makes us one, and then we split off again and go into our other fights.”
Beyond a few tweaks for brevity, the play stays fairly faithful to the source material. The show incorporates recognisable visuals from the films, such as the drunken gait of Woody Harrelson’s character, and the luminous blue wig sported by Stanley Tucci. But hardcore Hunger Games fans will be pleased by nods to lore found in the prequel novel Sunrise on the Reaping.
However, some elements are unique to the stage adaptation. In the 2010s films, the peacekeeper guards wore gleaming white armour akin to Star Wars stormtroopers. In the play, their mauve outfits are closer to the uniforms in Squid Game.
“There is pressure with a huge fan base,” Carragher admits, “and also as Jennifer Lawrence has already played the role. But what has been nice about this stage adaptation is that I’ve been able to find my own version of Katniss, and put my little mark on it.”
Throughout the show, Carragher recites passages from the book to the crowd. “It’s different that I can build the relationship with the audience and show Katniss’s vulnerability in a monologue, and then the wall she puts up when she’s having conversations with some characters.”
Whenever Carragher was unsure how Katniss felt, she would delve into the first book for answers. She reckons theatregoers don’t need to have completed all 575,000 words of the series to follow the play. “It’s a great way to first watch the story. It’s super immersive.” The show focuses more on the drama of the Hunger Games arena than the satirical politics of the world beyond it.
The production is staged in the round, 1,200 seats form a sparkling amphitheatre. Two sections of seating move mid-show. The audience is split into sections named for the 12 districts. Sometimes Carragher talks to the crowd as if they were her comrades. Sometimes – such as when Katniss is interviewed on a chat show – the theatregoers stand in for ultra-wealthy Capitol citizens who spend ludicrous amounts of money on the Hunger Games for their entertainment.
Complex rigging enables action to occur mid-air. Carragher scales a climbing net and clambers across metal beams. She even soars over the stage in a chariot, with flames large enough to warm the front rows’ faces. “We do need to be really aware of our surroundings when we’re up there,” Carragher says, “because something could go wrong. But now, I don’t even have time to think about how high it is.”
Suzanne Collins herself visited the technical rehearsals. Carragher recalls: “She just sat and watched. She was really thankful to us. And we were all saying, ‘No, thank you. Because we wouldn’t even be in this theatre right now if it weren’t for you.’”
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The first preview on 20 October was not met with universal praise. Theatregoers complained on social media that owing to a delayed start, lengthy queues and a three-hour runtime, they didn’t make it out of the theatre until near midnight. The play has since been “mushed” into a more reasonable two hours and 30 minutes, including the interval. The director cut back the dancing, and overhauled the opening. The show used to begin with Katniss experiencing a distorted nightmare of the tributes. Instead, Carragher emerges from sub-stage and quotes the book.
“We’ve got it to a really good place. The more we do it, the more comfortable everyone is.” The actors have developed a ritual of doing ten squats, five press-ups, then several pirouettes for good luck before they split off to their starting positions. Carragher has filled up her dressing room with beanbags and encouraging notes from the cast. She’s even taken up painting miniature canvases to calm her mind between shows.
The stage show has been extended until October 2026. In addition to this, Carragher will appear alongside Jason Isaacs and Charlotte Kirk in a film called Mistletoe & Wine. Her main requirement for future roles is that they’re “something cool, because this is literally the coolest thing ever. I want to keep on that vibe.”
“The themes of The Hunger Games are still present now.” Carragher references “the hierarchy” of the Capitol and the districts as an important motif. “I think everyone experiences that, maybe in workplaces, or around the world.
“This play doesn’t shy away from the horrificness. I hope people have a good time as well, but leave and think about the story. You can re-read it so many times. I never get tired of it. “Every time you watch it, you see different things. The story will never die.”
The Hunger Games: On Stage plays the Troubadour Canary Wharf Theatre until Oct 2026.
